|dev|null wrote on Sep 17^th, 2014 at 3:25pm:


I never asked you anything on this thread so it proves eff all!

Why don't you ask the ISIS and Hamas
and Hezb'allah tuff eggs what jihad means, Brain?

polite_gandalf wrote on Sep 17^th, 2014 at 3:34pm:


Ah.

The Koran does not teach humility:

7 minutes 15 seconds

polite_gandalf wrote on Sep 17^th, 2014 at 6:34pm:


I mean, ah - the old linguistic switcheroo.

A similar cunning ruse occurred in Christianity. Until the Middle Ages, the idea of the devil as we understand him did not exist. Jesus never mentioned the devil, and the Torah uses different names to describe what Christians came to perceive as a horned red figure with a tail. Lucifer, Moloch, "the Beast"in the New Testament Book of Revelation - all were merged to become one personification of evil: Satan.

The ancients certainly believed in dark forces, but the idea of two universal forces, good and evil, pitted again each other since Creation did not exist until the first millennium. It is not a pagan idea, and it is certainly not a Jewish idea.

Nietzsche believed that evil was invented by the Jews - not as a theological construct, more a sense of resentment born from their history of enslavement. But the devil was a certainly a Medieval Christian creation, borrowed also by Islam.

As I understand it, it would make sense that the notion of jihad would have its origins in the idea of violent conflict. Muhammed’s audience lived through war. The cities they lived in and traded with were always swapping hands. Populations were constantly being enslaved or used as mercenaries. The sides they fought for switched rulers, and soldiers switched armies. The very purpose of Islam, if we are to believe its founder, was to bring peace to an ever-shifting world of violence and chaos.

Back then, the metaphor of war to describe the spiritual/ethical struggle would have made sense. The same idea was a constant theme in Shakespeare, and the theme of the Bhagavad Gita, the chapter in the Vedic Mahabharata where God works as the main character’s advisor in a war between two families.

Just as Shakespeare used a family feud as a metaphor for love in Romeo and Juliet, and the Bhagavad Gita uses war as a metaphor for overcoming your own desires, war was used by Muhammed to define the struggle of ethics - a struggle as much within yourself as outside yourself.

Many misunderstand this struggle because we labour under the bastardized  Medieval yoke of personified good and evil. The ancients had quite a different idea of this struggle, and within the heart of the monotheistic religions, the source is still there to be found for those who choose to look.

Forgive me for not sticking with ah.

Soren wrote on Sep 17^th, 2014 at 8:47pm:


Thanks, old boy. In future, I’ll try. Jihad, innit.

Shakespeare did not write for travelling Thespians, or even people watching movies or Youtube. He wrote for actors he knew in the Rose and the Globe theatres. He thought his plays would be one-hit wonders. He put everything he had - his "art" - into his sonnets.None of Shakespeare’s plays exist. All we have are the words certain audience members wrote - probably rival producers who wanted to steal the work.

Shakespeare’s actors threw out their handwritten lines.

Likewise, Muhammed did not write for backpacker jihadis with rocket launchers and AKs. Muhammed did not write at all. He spoke to people who came to listen.

Parallels with literature are there because it’s how we engage with religious texts - texts that, like Shakespeare’s plays - were written afterwards - from memory, or people furiously listening and scribbling and maybe hoping that, one day, they might make a buck out of it all.

Ah.

Soren wrote on Sep 17^th, 2014 at 9:47pm:


Well spotted. I was, in my cunning example of Taqiyya, trying to think of a way to include Eros and Thanitos in my little discussion of good and evil.

Perhaps it says something about Freud’s "suspicion" that I’m unable to make the conceptual leap from good and evil to life and death.

Or we could just blame Islam. Never to mind the bollocks, isn’t it.